In today's IT-driven office environment, an important factor in improvement of efficiency is in that an image of a paper document or the like is read out by a scanner apparatus and the image is stored and managed in the form of electronic scan data.
New scanner apparatuses having an additional function have recently been developed. Such a scanner apparatus not only reads out data but also is capable of sending the data thus read out to a shared folder of a client apparatus (e.g. personal computer) which has been registered in advance.
Applications software for storing, managing, and processing images read out by a scanner apparatus have been diffused. Some types of such applications software automatically perform data processing (analysis) such as tilt correction and OCR process with respect to data stored in a specific folder (application data folder) of a client apparatus.
At the current technological level, to automatically perform data processing by applications software, data to be processed must be stored in a particular folder specified by each type of applications software.
In such an environment where a scanner apparatus and an application software are used, for example, there have been following three ways to store data in the specific folder and perform data processing with respect to the stored data.
In the first way, either after scan data is supplied in the form of an attachment to e-mail from the scanner apparatus to the client apparatus or after scan data is sent to a specific folder of the client apparatus, the user operates the client apparatus so as to store the data in an application data folder.
In the second way, as recited in the below-mentioned patent document 1, the scanner apparatus searches (browses in) a network so as to acquire the directory structure of the client apparatus which is the destination of data, and the user selects a desired destination of data by means of the display screen of the scanner apparatus.
In the third way, as recited in the below-mentioned patent document 2, the paths of respective shared folders of client apparatuses are registered in advance in the scanner apparatus, and a shared folder among the registered shared folders is selected as the destination of storing, by means of the operation panel or the like of the scanner apparatus, so that scan data is stored in the selected client apparatus.
However, to store scan data in the specific application data folder, all of these ways involve troublesome procedures such that scan data must be manually moved, the directory structure of the target client apparatus must be searched for, and the user is required to specify the destination among all registered apparatuses.
For example, in the first way, the user is required to manually re-store, in an application data folder of a client apparatus, the data received by the client apparatus.
In the second way, the user is required to select a desired client apparatus among many client apparatuses on the network, and also required to repeat inputs until a desired storage location is found in the multilayered directory of the selected client apparatus.
In the third way, the shared folders of all client apparatuses are registered in the scanner apparatus. The user is therefore required to find and select a desired shared folder among numerous registered shared folders. Since it takes a long time to complete the selection, the efficiency may be deteriorated rather than improved. For example, many users share a scanner apparatus and each client apparatus has many shared folders, in a typical office environment. Therefore, according to the third way, it is necessary to store sets of destination information corresponding to the number of client apparatuses connected to the scanner apparatus and corresponding to the number of shared folders of the client apparatuses. The user is therefore required to find and select a desired set of destination information from many sets of destination information. Such operations are troublesome and time-consuming.
Furthermore, in the third way, in case where an application data folder is not a shared folder, it is not possible to directly store scan data in the application data folder from the scanner apparatus. The user is therefore required to manually move, to the application data folder, scan data stored in a shared folder. Alternatively, the user is required to set the application data folder as a shared folder in advance.
The following patent documents 3-9 teach technologies in regard to automatic identification of document formats.